corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8152

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Hargreaves S.
Ghost authorship of industry funded drug trials is common, say researchers
BMJ 2007 Feb 3; 334:(7587):223
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/334/7587/223


Abstract:

Ghost authorship, whereby someone who has made a major contribution to a scientific article as an author is not acknowledged, is a widespread practice, says a study published this week.

In the clinical trials investigated in the study, three quarters of individuals who had made significant contributions to the final paper were not listed as authors (PLoS Medicine 2007;4:e19). In most cases these were statisticians working for the company sponsoring the trial.

“Ghost authorship is a form of research misappropriation, and we believe that this practice serves commercial purposes,” said the study’s lead author, Peter Gøtzsche, of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen.

“Authorship establishes accountability, responsibility, and credit for scientific articles. If authorship is misappropriated, readers may be misled, and the potential for manipulated analyses and conclusions may increase,” he added.

The researchers assessed all published, industry initiated randomised trials approved in 1994-5 by the scientific and ethical . . .

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909